How much vram is good enough for Iray renders?

zaselim

Hello everyone.

So i have been waiting to upgrade my gtx1070 because i am not happy for quite a while now with the time it takes to render scenes and the new rtx 3000 series will be releasing starting 17th Sept.

My first choice was rtx 3080 but it has 10gb of vram, i was hoping it to have more than 2080ti (11Gb) vram but it is less. Here in my country this type of stuff is very pricy, like RTX 3080 (699usd) will cost me around 980 atleast or more.

So my friend is coming from Canada this October and I only have to choices either RTX3080 or RTX3090, Lets say I decide to wait for rumored 16Gb or 20Gb rtx3080 (possibly 3080ti at 899$ at least) to release which will cost me around the same price (around 1300 USD or more, RTX 2080ti is around 1490 USD here) of rtx 3090 here in my country because then I'll have to get it from here.

So i'm thinking of asking my friend to buy RTX 3090 (1500 USD) instead RTX 3080, and i don't wanna go with dual GPU because that way I'll also have to replace my Corsair AX860i (860w) PSU.

I will also be gaming at 4k/60 with ray tracing on, so my question is will the RTX 3080 (with 10Gb of vram) be enough for multiple character scenes(iray-renders) or should i go for RTX3090 (24gb)? 

It is also possible that by the end of next year 10gb of vram would become insufficient for 4k gaming with the nee generation of games.

What do you guys suggest i do?

 

nicstt

IMO 11 or 10 as the 3080 will have is the minimum one should aim for; yes you can manage with less, but the experience is not as good - as you're finding.

I believe (my opinion) that Iray is a hog, but if you insist on rendering on it, then you have to either get a card with the most RAM you can afford, even at the cost of giving up performance; doesn't matter how fast a card it, it's a paper weigth if your scene wont fit on the card. Alternatively, you have to optimise your scene to fit - reduce texture size; render the scene in parts; delete all geometry out of the camera's view (leaving some for reflections depends on what one requires.

... Or move to an alternative render engine - moving to an alternative render engine won't necessarily mean you don't have to do what I've suggested anyway.

Gaming and Rendering are on different levels of intensity; a good gaming rig, is only an adequate (depending on what you're doing - maybe only barely adequate) rendering rig. My point here is that big studios throw millions of dollars/pounds (whatever) at the problem.

j cade

How many characters exactly? I have a 6gb card and can generally fit 2 characters, and a stonemason set on it with little difficulty. (I'm using stonemason sets and different scenery sets by different artists have vastly different memory requirements there are a couple in the store that can almost freeze my computer by themselves)B-) Anything beyond that and I have to put effort into optimising. You mention you find your current 1070 slow. Is this because it is dropping to cpu frequently or is it the speed of the 1070 itself that you don't love? If it's the former than the bigger vram may be necessary if the latter there's a decent chance you can do without the extra vram

zaselim

I rendered a 3 (nude) characters 4x4 image with one 3 seater and one single seat sofa in 1 day with around 9000 iterations (8900s). I was aiming for at least 13000 so the white(static)dots can disappear completely in the darker areas. And yes i always turn the extra stuff into prop with far ones into low res textures(1000x1000 minimum) while everything in front/hilighted ones in 4000x4000 to 8000x8000 depending on the resolution(for square i use 4000x4000 and for 16:9 i use 7111x4000).

There are some scenes (heavy ones - from 3 characters to 8 to 10 with fully detailed environment) i have made but couldn't render because of the amount of time it was taking even for single iteration.

Right now i have 32gb of ram which I'll be replacing with 64gb (32Gb x 2) because my current board (Asus Maximus VIII Hero) only supports upto 64gb which I'll be replacing later next year with the CPU then I'll add more ram if I'll need it. This time around I'll be upgrading my system one or two components at a time.

LIke i said in my original post, right now I only have to options either go for RTX 3080 or RTX 3090 and I know its GDDR6X but still i am bit sceptical about the 10Gb of vram even for 4k/60 RT gaming. I can't go higher than the price of RTX 3090 and yes I want to do both gaming/rendering with one machine instead of getting separate for both.

nicstt

zaselim said:

I rendered a 3 (nude) characters 4x4 image with one 3 seater and one single seat sofa in 1 day with around 9000 iterations (8900s). I was aiming for at least 13000 so the white(static)dots can disappear completely in the darker areas. And yes i always turn the extra stuff into prop with far ones into low res textures(1000x1000 minimum) while everything in front/hilighted ones in 4000x4000 to 8000x8000 depending on the resolution(for square i use 4000x4000 and for 16:9 i use 7111x4000).

There are some scenes (heavy ones - from 3 characters to 8 to 10 with fully detailed environment) i have made but couldn't render because of the amount of time it was taking even for single iteration.

Right now i have 32gb of ram which I'll be replacing with 64gb (32Gb x 2) because my current board (Asus Maximus VIII Hero) only supports upto 64gb which I'll be replacing later next year with the CPU then I'll add more ram if I'll need it. This time around I'll be upgrading my system one or two components at a time.

LIke i said in my original post, right now I only have to options either go for RTX 3080 or RTX 3090 and I know its GDDR6X but still i am bit sceptical about the 10Gb of vram even for 4k/60 RT gaming. I can't go higher than the price of RTX 3090 and yes I want to do both gaming/rendering with one machine instead of getting separate for both.

Why were you aiming for N itterations?

What does that tell you?

zaselim

nicstt said:

zaselim said:

I rendered a 3 (nude) characters 4x4 image with one 3 seater and one single seat sofa in 1 day with around 9000 iterations (8900s). I was aiming for at least 13000 so the white(static)dots can disappear completely in the darker areas. And yes i always turn the extra stuff into prop with far ones into low res textures(1000x1000 minimum) while everything in front/hilighted ones in 4000x4000 to 8000x8000 depending on the resolution(for square i use 4000x4000 and for 16:9 i use 7111x4000).

There are some scenes (heavy ones - from 3 characters to 8 to 10 with fully detailed environment) i have made but couldn't render because of the amount of time it was taking even for single iteration.

Right now i have 32gb of ram which I'll be replacing with 64gb (32Gb x 2) because my current board (Asus Maximus VIII Hero) only supports upto 64gb which I'll be replacing later next year with the CPU then I'll add more ram if I'll need it. This time around I'll be upgrading my system one or two components at a time.

LIke i said in my original post, right now I only have to options either go for RTX 3080 or RTX 3090 and I know its GDDR6X but still i am bit sceptical about the 10Gb of vram even for 4k/60 RT gaming. I can't go higher than the price of RTX 3090 and yes I want to do both gaming/rendering with one machine instead of getting separate for both.

Why were you aiming for N itterations?

What does that tell you?

Actually there is no specific number, It depends on the scene. With just one character with no background and extra stuff what so ever I find that render satisfactory in terms of quality after 4 to 5000 iterations.

I run the render with maximum level of settings and then stop it when i find that render satisfactory, some take 4 to 6000 to 8000 iterations and some take from 13000 to more iterations completion.

Before i use to ran a render on a locked specified settings which i saw in one of the threads here for high quality render but then i saw that some renders have white dots(unfinished pixels/noise) in them and then i searched about it and learn that it happens due to iterations being low in finsihed render and learn new settings for how to increase them. Then those renders completed fine but then more heaver scenes required more then i set the render time and iterations to maximum capacity (300000), with this being set i manually stop the render when i see it being fit to my required quality. But I find most of my heavy renders' quality to my liking at 13000 to 16000 iterations. My approach to it may be wrong but with my current knowledge of Daz Studio, its the only thing i can do to get my renders in full quality.

My last 2 renders are in 7111x4000 resolution with one being 70Mb and the other one is 68Mb in size and I stopped both of them at 14000s iterations and they still had some unfinished pixels in shadowy areas on the characters' skin. I can post the low res version, to show what those render are, here if adult images are allowed.

The 4k version of this render took around 9000 iterations

[spoiler]

Image removed

[spoiler]

And this one(4k version) took 13000+ iterations

 

nicstt

Nice renders.

The reason I ask is that they are pretty much meaningless.

If it looks good, then it's done, which is what you said you do. :)

zaselim

nicstt said:

Nice renders.

The reason I ask is that they are pretty much meaningless.

If it looks good, then it's done, which is what you said you do. :)

Yeah :D

Mattymanx

Perhaps you just need to trim your resource usage down.  Thankfully I have a product for that (shameless plug) - https://www.daz3d.com/resource-saver-shaders-collection-for-iray -

on sale SHORTLY.....

zaselim

Mattymanx said:

Perhaps you just need to trim your resource usage down.  Thankfully I have a product for that (shameless plug) - https://www.daz3d.com/resource-saver-shaders-collection-for-iray -

on sale SHORTLY.....

is it good?